Intellectual savages?

Ferocious Palestinian anti-Semites have been sanitized by the Western public opinion which calls them “militants,” as The New York Times did last week.

Hamas Headquarters bombed 390.
(photo credit:REUTERS/Suhaib Salem)

Benighted humanists in Israel and in the West believe that Hamas’s terrorists
are brainwashed, poor or illiterate, when in fact the best minds of Palestinian
society are at the top of Islamic terrorism.

Is it inconceivable that
people who have the holy mission of returning to Jaffa and Ashkelon on a carpet
of Jewish bodies are also well-educated surgeons, academics and writers? Ask
Hamas about the paradox of Josef Mengele, a doctor of philosophy, a medical
doctor, a refined man who enjoyed music and poetry, but didn’t hesitate to
experiment on an order the death of a million of Jews.

The Palestinian
hatred has not been deciphered by our writers and intellectuals. It’s because we
have been told that “they hate us” is the language of xenophobes, the illiberal,
the intolerant; that genocidal anti-Semitism was buried in the ashes of
Auschwitz; that we have to be polite and self-critical.

A seductive
combination of post-colonial white guilt mixed with liberal condescension has
dulled our moral senses and made us blind to an Islamism that conveys unleashed
hatred, contempt, physical aggression, the desire to expel, to destroy and to
eliminate the Jews.

Nizar Rayan was not only a Hamas terrorist leader. He
was a fine historian, academic and intellectual. Author of more than 10 books on
Islam, Rayan was killed in Jabalya along with his wife and three children. They
remained in the house even after the Israelis had warned them of the raid. Rayan
had sent a son on a suicide mission against a Jewish town in northern Gaza and
had taken part in an attack on the Israeli port of Ashdod, which killed 10 “sons
of pigs and monkeys,” as Rayan call the Jews.

Rayan was a gem of the
Islamic University of Gaza, he had studied at the prestigious faculty of Um
Dorman and had written an essay on the life of the Prophet, titled “Medina
becomes Dark,” a best-seller in Saudi Arabia. His library, destroyed in the
Israeli raid, contained 10,000 books.

Palestinian terrorism is led by
academics, surgeons, scientists, scholars, intellectuals, people with an
enviable curriculum vitae. Their biographies are the Palestinian version of
al-Qaida. They are like Ayman al-Zawahiri, al- Qaida mastermind and a surgeon;
Omar Sheikh, the mastermind in the execution of Daniel Pearl, who had studied at
the London School of Economics; and the planner of the September 11 attacks,
Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who attended US universities.

The head of the
July 7 suicide bombers, Muhammad Siddique Khan, taught in Leeds, while the
English doctor Bilal Abdullah, who participated in the failed attacks in London
and Glasgow in June 2007, was born into one of the richest families in
Baghdad.

THE HAMAS leadership is the most educated in the Arab world,
with 500 high-level degrees between them.

Its leader, Khaled Mashaal, is
a professor of physics and was an academic in Kuwait. Gaza’s prime minister,
Ismail Haniyeh, was dean of a university and his strongman for religious
affairs, Muhammad Tartouri, is a dean of the College of Shari’a in Hevron,
epicenter of jihad against the Jews.

Even among the Palestinian Arab
“secular” terrorists you find many PhDs. Ahmed Sadat, who ordered the killing of
Israeli minister Rehavam Ze’evi, is a professor, while terror mastermind George
Habash was a doctor.

That is because there is no difference between the
Hamas Covenant and the Covenant of the PLO. They both want Israel’s territorial
truncation and eventual annihilation.

Fathi Shaqaqi, the late founder of
Islamic Jihad, was a physician. The last of the Hamas’s founders still alive,
Mahmoud Zahar, is an excellent doctor, a well-known specialist in the thyroid
who founded the Palestinian Medical Society, his wife is a teacher, one of their
children had a degree in finance and a daughter is a professor of
English.

These two doctors are responsible for scores of children, women
and elderly being incinerated on Egged buses in Israel; cafes and pizzerias
destroyed; malls turned into slaughterhouses; mothers and daughters killed in
front of ice cream shops; families exterminated in their own beds; infants
executed with a blow to the base of the skull; fruit markets blown to pieces;
nightclubs eviscerated along with hundreds of students; rabbinic seminarians
murdered during their studies; husbands and wives killed in front of their
children; children murdered in their mothers’ arms.

A well-known
pediatrician was the Hamas leader Abdul Aziz Rantisi, a senior manager of the
Arab Medical Society known for his tireless campaign to “kill as many Jews as
possible.” Doctor Rantisi ordered that pieces of metal should be added to the
explosives in the terrorist’s vest or backpack, with blasts often severing limbs
completely. Israeli children have had their faces burned or their hands rendered
useless; some have had their sight ruined forever.

A talented
mathematician is Siyaam Saeed, Minister of the Interior. A former education
minister, Nasser Eddin to Sha’er, studied in Manchester and New York. Ibrahim
Hamed, the planner of brutal attacks such as the Moment Café, Ben-Yehuda Street
and Hebrew University murders has a BA magna cum laude.

Baseem Naeem
became a surgeon in Germany, Atif Adwan owes its formation to the most brilliant
scientific universities in the United Kingdom, while Aziz Dweik learned perfect
English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mousa Marzook, accused by
Israel of involvement in the murder of Israeli civilians between 1990 and 1994,
studied at Louisiana Tech and Columbia University.

Of the Palestinian
suicide bombers, 47 percent had a college degree, 29% a high school diploma, 24%
attended primary school. People like Dia Tawil, who came from a “bourgeois”
family with no financial problems, “only” dreamed of killing Israelis. Tawil’s
last words were: “Their bones will know the taste of death.”

Israel is
confronting Islamic revolutionaries ready to drench the holy land with blood and
Palestinian Arab pediatricians who send their angels of death to kill Israeli
children. But we also live in a time when death – of Jews – is celebrated and
romanticized in the “civilized” democracies.

These ferocious Palestinian
anti-Semites have been sanitized by the Western public opinion which calls them
“militants,” as The New York Times did last week.

I fear for
Israel.The writer is is an Italian journalist and author. His columns
have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary.